Curated Stories June 17, 2010

Where’s Waldo and I Spy are two kids books that work best when they’re held right up to the face, just like the iPad. Thankfully, both of them got gorgeous, th…

Hubspot says that pop culture – movies, books, TV shows – have attracted the most likes on Facebook. I’m not surprised. But it does justify cross-media storytelling.

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Ori Brafman is the co-author of Click: The Magic of Instant Connections, published by Random House this week.With all the news about Facebook’s never-ending privacy problems and the exodus of angry users, ha…

There’s an ever increasingly spirited debate going on in the blogosphere among the technorati (starting with Joe Wilcox and John Gruber) around the subject of comments in blogs. In the simplest terms, the arg…

Twitter this week began testing a new type of advertising: “Promoted Trends.”Under the new system, brands can pay to appear below the “Trending Topics,” the most talked-about terms on Twitter at any g…

It’s the oldest argument in the Marketing and Advertising world: does advertising work?

The answer is, obviously, yes. If it didn’t, advertising agencies would not exist and brands would be spending many count…

For the past two days, I had the chance to interact with a brilliant group of professionals from some of the largest brands in the world on how they are using social media at the Corporate Social Media Summit i…

Restaurants use pricey high-end broilers to crank out perfectly cooked steaks. You can recreate the experience of a dry-aged and deliciously broiled steak at h…

If you’re looking for things to write about, let me direct you over to Talk About Local, where the folks there are on a roll with hyperlocal content ideas. They’ve posted several articles in the last couple…

An intrepid Android user has found a bug in the HTC Incredible that raises some potential privacy concerns.As BGR reports, the HTC Sense UI takes screenshots of your web browser for its bookmark widget that ar…

5 Ways to Get More From Local SearchThis content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Showing up in the top of the search results for local searches is quickly becoming some of the most important local real estate going….

Filed under: iPad

Developer Saied Ghaffari’s company, It’s About Time, should be well known to TUAW readers. We highlighted the widget iPad app the company created, which regretfully never made it to the App…

Jack Shedd:

I’ve noticed an odd tendency in Android device reviews. Their
flaws, always major and always awe-inspiring in their insipidness,
are inevitably attributed more to the device itself than to…

See a photo of Steve, his bio, Part 1 of this QA, and Part 2, and Part 3, and Part 3.

QA with Steve Spalding, Question 4:

Q: Are there any current uses of storytelling that repel you or that you feel are…

If you’re a photographer or artist, whether a professional or a casual uploader, protecting your images from copyright infirngement is important.Simply put, images are among the most commonly misused types…

I wrote a similar post a year ago, and thought now might be a good time to update the Twitter list of Adaptive Path.

Twitter is a valuable outlet for us. Sometimes we talk user experience, sometimes we compla…

How does Google keep its employees fresh for long days and nights of working? With sleep pods.
FT reporter Richard Waters was in Google’s Mountain View headquarters yesterday and snapped this photo of an anonym…

WordPress 3.0 has just arrived on the scene — the thirteenth major release of the popular blogging software. It’s the result of six months of work from a total of 218 different contributors. You can downlo…

Anand Giridharadas of the New York Times traces the origins of using the word “so” to start sentences, and its widespread adoption.

So, it is widely believed that the recent ascendancy of “so” began in Silicon…

Yesterday, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, announced that email was on its way out as a core form of communication.
“If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow,” she told the crowd at Nielsen Con…

Blogging platform WordPress just released their 3.0 “Thelonious” update, debuting, among other things, an attractive and modern-looking default theme and a bul…

In the immediate aftermath of a slew of new upgrades, Google Docs is changing how we share and control privacy for our documents, presentations and other stored files.The changes are intended to make sharing a…

By now, you’ve heard that ATT has stopped offering all-you-can-eat wireless data subscriptions, instituting monthly bandwidth caps and overage fees for its new customers.
The changes pissed off a lot of people,…

Computers beating humans at chess? Easy. Computers beating humans at Jeopardy? Unimaginably challenging–but an IBM supercomputer is now a really good (but not yet brilliant) Jeopardy player, and is gearing up…

Socailtext is adopting Twitter annotations for a new service it is calling Socailtext Connect. The service is a method for connecting legacy apps by surfacing events that appear in an activity stream.

The serv…

Megan Berry is Marketing Manager for Klout, the standard for online influence. She also blogs at The Huffington Post and Brazen Careerist. You can follow her on Twitter at @meganberry.You know your business…

Foursquare’s Android app has racked up 50,000 downloads since last week, the company just tweeted. That’s a huge surge: they have 300,000 downloads lifetime.Join the conversation about this story »

Internships have become a hot topic over the past few months ever since the U.S. Labor department started cracking down on unpaid work.
At least one publication,The Atlantic, has taken the issue seriously enoug…

Twitter has just launched the next phase of its advertising strategy: In addition to “promoted tweets,” in which a brand can pay to have its tweet show up higher in the Twitter stream, the company now off…

Microsoft’s official release last week of its cloud computing platform, Azure, gives developers the option to build applications in the cloud via Microsoft’s data centers, rather than in a company’s server. Giv…

We’ve not tested this and we’re as yet not sure if it falls foul of Apple’s new developer guidelines — after all it consists of a third party development solution, albeit one based on standards. Sencha Tou…

Pic c/o some hard-working AussiesInteresting (and as ever) thought-provoking post from Seth on the end of the officeWhilst topical (and hugely resonant for those of us who live on thin air), its not exactly…

Jason Fell from Folio: Magazine was nice enough to send me some new research from the Online Publishers Association.

The goal of the OPA research was to help brand marketers understand the value of placin…

With the pervasiveness of social networks and the conversations that take place within each, many had hoped for either the reduction in volume of traditional email or the socialization of the inbox. Instead, e…

Does social media influence the culture of a company? Are employees who are active in social media more influential in their company? And if so why?

These are all questions I’ve been asking …

“A blog isn’t a business plan.” I recently saw that tweet on Twitter, and it really hit home for me the perils of using a new technology or communications tool and thinking that mastering its use …

Only 11% of teens email each day, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told a conference crowd yesterday.
“Email is probably going away,” she said.
Going away is a bit much – email remains an important tool for busin…

In a recent episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert offered a rather jumbled stream of commentary on social networking wunderkind, Twitter — from taking The New York Times to task over its recently no…

If you’d like to enjoy the outdoors today, we suggest you stop reading right now.What follows are five iPad addictive games that maximize screen real-estate with luring graphics, break ground in the handheld…

We have discussed the security risks of local business listing hijackings in the past. One of the comments made about these security discussions is why do the geo-listing websites like Google, Yahoo, Bi…

For any e-retailer, product search is the foundation of a commerce platform. Many times, a consumer goes directly to the search box to find the object they want. And the ability to easily find products on a ret…

Chicago-based Groupon is one of the hottest startups in the world right now, but as a user, I’ve always had one complaint: There are WAY too many Brazilian waxing and spa deals on there for me to handle. I’ve…

Voice is one of the most important elements of a successful blog. Period.
Without voice, new arrivals to your blog won’t read beyond the first paragraph.
Give your readers a strong voice, though, and they…

Socrates is considered one of the chief founders of Western philosophy. We know Socrates primarily from the accounts of other writers: from his student, Plato, from Xenophon, the historian, as well as from the…

For entrepreneurs who devote considerable thought and energy to starting and growing a business, getting the marketing funnel right is vital.It’s hard to find content that is helpful in a very actionable and m…

While I’m a big fan of Instapaper’s “Read It Later” tool, Evernote is my system of record for all my notes and collected information. Simply put, any large project I’m working on, general reference no…

The Huffington Post, with its legion of unpaid contributors, has
provided a controversial model for journalism and publishing in the
digital age. Despite the controversy, it’s hard to
argue that the Huffington…

First impressions count. Malcolm Gladwell popularized this familiar notion recently in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: we make snap, lasting judgments and decisions that in many cases may b…

This post is part of the Entrepreneurship series – sponsored by AcceptPay from American Express, a new online solution that lets you electronically invoice customers and accept online payments-all in one place…

My friend Arik Hanson started compiling a reader’s choice awards for public relations blogs last year. Arik is a smart guy and a hell of a blogger in his own right and the program was both a k…

Since April, Twitter users have grown accustomed to Twitter’s first ad revenue play: Promoted Tweets. Today, the second phase of that strategy is starting to be tested: Promoted Trending Topics. The first suc…

Today Google Scholar, the search service for academic literature, has launched a blog.

The fact of Google Scholar having proven popular enough to merit a blog is surely an indication of the importance of Web a…

Last week, we talked about the benefits that come from guest blogging on high traffic blogs. If you’re just stopping in this week, here’s a brief review:

Guest blogging gets people talking about you.
Gues…

Two of the core tenets of web design is “don’t make users think” and “manage to focus users’ attention” (see great list at Smashing Magazine). In short – this means that every pixel should be aime…

Mashable’s Spark of Genius series highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, see details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpar…

In this video, Peter Merholz shares a project plan for designing products 3-5 years into the future. This is the second installment of Whiteboard Confessionals, in which we share what’s happening on our off…

We’ve all heard about mayor deals with Foursquare. That is, a person who is the “mayor ” of a venue (essentially, has checked-in there the most number of times) gets access to special deals, such free ite…

1st Web Designer on finding the right keyword:1. Define the keywords that people use to find your business 2. Find out how many people are actually using the keywords you have selected 3. Define your competit…

Get twenty different search marketers in a room
and you’ll often get twenty different opinions on a subject; but there is a growing consensus that some tweaks were made to the Google Algorithim in the
last fe…

Spanning the Android
Javascripters who slammed Apple and Google for hyping HTML5 are offering a claimed frustration-free answer to coding for iPads, iPhones and Androids.…

Social media has become such an important marketing channel for brands that it is not surprising to read that a February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey showed that 33% of Facebook users have become fans…

The future is something that frightens some people and excites others.
Some people wake up every morning with dread and others leap out of bed excited to face the day and all it holds. Some industries are grow…

Today TweetMeme has upgraded its popular ReTweet Button with language support. The language update means that publishers can show buttons and pop-ups in seven different languages, and users can automatically t…

Short-form social network Twitter has taken a bold new step in exploring its potential business model. The company appears to have begun promoting keywords in its “trending topics” list for sponsors.

When us…

This may come as a surprise, but the new Microsoft Hotmail is actually pretty good. But how does it stack up to Google’s email champion, Gmail? Here’s a look…

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how game mechanics can play a role in motivating behavior and making services more engaging, thanks in part to the success of foursquare and Farmville. You may have e…

As we get ready to kick off our Techdirt Saves* Journalism event, it’s definitely been an interesting day on the “journalism” front. Earlier today, we wrote about Iceland’s decision to create a haven for free…

The New York Times reported today that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has agreed to work with former Time Magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson on an authorized biography. As Jobs is usually not someone who is terribl…

Shortly before I decided to put book-writing aside and return to consulting, I very seriously thought of writing a book called iPhoneGate. While the book would walk through the often unexciting saga of Gizmod…

Narrative media is undergoing a shift from the traditional model of
single, linear story lines to much broader explorations of the story
world. Narratives are developed within larger contexts where even
terti…

Barrett Lane is a blogger for Yipit, the personalized daily deal recommendation service. You can find more of his posts on Yipit’s blog. He is also @barrett_lane on Twitter. Everyone loves a great deal, so i…

Hey sports aficionados, how does saving $10 at Sports Authority stores nationwide sound? Probably a little too good to be true, but for mayors of the sporting goods retail chain on Foursquare, this discount is…

As Google Docs rolls out the updates we wrote about in April, Microsoft Office 2010 is hogging the limelight. And just last week Microsoft released Office Web Apps. It may seem like Microsoft is encroaching on…